Re: Setup

[David Boersma]

Hello Tom,

Welcome to Lilypond!

> I have downloaded, I think, the current version of Lilypond and it
> looks very promising...

You ain't seen nothing yet... ;-)

> but I don't understand what I should do get get
> it up and running. Is it Cygwin?  Is there a manual somewhere? Thanks,
> Tom Tulen.

There is lots of manual: a FAQ, a VFAQ, a tutorial, a reference manual and
last but not least mailing list archives. You can find it all at
lilypond.org. It is really there. In the mailing list archives you will
find threads with e.g. 'Windows questions' and some of them address
possible installation problems and useful links with more information.

But first check if you followed the default instructions completely. How
far did you get? From your mail it sounds like you downloaded setup.exe
and executed it; but you do not know how to start the program. I guess you
downloaded from the page
http://lilypond.org/stable/Documentation/windows/out-www/installing.html
under 'Windows binary setup'. Did you proceed with the 'Windows running
setup'? Did you open a bash shell and execute (successfully) the command
"lilypond --help" (withouth quotes)? If yes, then I invite you to start
reading the tutorial.

Sometimes people expect lilypond to pop up a window where you can edit
music by point&click. That is not its design philosophy. The idea is that
you prepare a plain text file with a description of the music. You process
that with lilypond (or rather: ly2dvi) and you then get dvi file which you
can convert to your image format of choice. There is a program 'noteedit'
or so (browse the mailinglists for some announcements of it) which gives
you the nice Graphical User Interface you expect and it can use Lilypond
as its typesetting engine. But there are (IMHO) lots of advantages to
editing a text file over clicking in a GUI, especially when the pieces get
longer and when you would like to rearrange things.

BTW, people here are eager to improve (accessability of) the
documentation. A lot of effort already went into it, but if you have any
suggestions about how to make things as easy & obvious as possible for the
newbie, please let the developers know!

David Boersma